Start from 113 curated places around New Orleans, LA, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Commander's Palace
Garden District landmark since 1893 in a turquoise-and-white Victorian, where the kitchen has been training the city's best chefs for thirty years. Haute Creole, jazz brunch on weekends, dress code taken seriously.
Cochon
Warehouse District Cajun spot in a converted brick warehouse, James Beard winner, run by chefs Donald Link and Stephen Stryjewski. Whole-hog Louisiana cooking — wood-grilled oysters, fried alligator, slow-roasted suckling pig — in a room that hits the right side of rustic.
Trails & outdoors
Audubon Park
Uptown's 350-acre park between St. Charles and the Mississippi levee — flat paved 1.8-mile loop under Spanish-moss-draped live oaks, around a chain of small lagoons. The path runners, dog walkers, and stroller crowds use every morning.
New Orleans City Park
1,300-acre Mid-City park with the country's largest collection of mature live oaks, 24 miles of trails, two museums (NOMA and the Besthoff Sculpture Garden) inside its borders, and the Big Lake loop locals run at dawn. Bigger than Central Park.
Things to do
Preservation Hall
1961 French Quarter jazz room with no air conditioning, no drinks for sale, and three or four 45-minute sets a night by a rotating roster of 100+ master New Orleans jazz musicians. The room is small, the floor uneven, and the music the country's most honest traditional jazz.
The Spotted Cat Music Club
Frenchmen Street's archetypal jazz club — free entry, one-drink minimum, multiple bands a night spanning trad jazz, gypsy swing, blues, and Klezmer. The room is the size of a generous living room and bands play on a postage-stamp stage at the front window.
Landmarks & sights
Jackson Square
The walled, gated park anchoring the French Quarter, ringed by the St. Louis Cathedral, the Cabildo, the Presbytère, and the Pontalba apartments. Also a working open-air art market — painters and tarot readers set up along the wrought-iron fence every day the weather holds.
St. Louis Cathedral
Oldest continuously active Catholic cathedral in the United States. Free to walk in, free to linger, and a working parish — Mass is the way to see it the way the parishioners do.